We have completed the transition to new software for the site. We hope you enjoy the changes.

The Old

The site used to be powered by a product called "Confluence", but we had to go to a different one for several reasons which I'll briefly mention.

We moved to a hosted server with a limited amount of RAM, which did not sit well with Confluence.
Confluence was not designed for what we were trying to use it for: What we needed was more of a content management system less of a wiki.
Every time we upgraded to a new version, I had to spend too much time figuring out why it broke. Some plugins behaved inconsistently across versions.

I don't want to downplay Confluence. It's a big and feature-rich product, however, the headaches were not worth it. Perhaps it will be more polished/tested down the line.

The New

Confluence was the old, Drupal is the new. It's very flexible, fairly easy to maintain and works well. I do have some issues with it (Yeah, I'm hard to please).

Can something be too flexible? The answer is Drupal. There's a point at which flexibility becomes a bad thing. In my eyes, a solid content management system needs to have a balance between flexibility and structure. With Drupal, you need an excessive number of modules to make it work close to the way you want it to. Many little details have to be configured and have to be configured too often. Setting up Input Formats is especially fun: A lot of input filters I tried had bad interactions with other filters. It becomes a game of re-arranging the filters to make them work properly. There needs to be more structure. More rules. Lastly, Drupal is written in PHP, which I'm not particularly fond of, but hey it's getting the job done so I'm not going to complain (too much).

What's the future? Drupal 6 is around the corner and I'm really hoping it addresses some of the issues I encountered. If not, there are other solutions out there, or solutions that have not been created yet...